Buying Time Warner Cable, the second-largest U.S cable-TV company brings Comcast more than 11 million residential subscribers.

“This leaves Comcast as the sole king of the cable hill, with John Malone and Charter Communications hitting a brick wall in their hopes of becoming a close No. 2,” said Richard Greenfield, an analyst with BTIG LLC.

A tie-up between Comcast and Time Warner Cable would face tough scrutiny from the FCC, according to Craig Moffett, an analyst at MoffettNathanson LLC. The merged company would account for almost three-quarters of the cable industry, data from the National Cable Television Association show.

According to GigaOm, the two companies together will control about half the triple-play services — video, voice and internet — in the U.S., with a combined 33 million broadband connections.

At end of 2013, Comcast’s average revenue per user was around $151.30 a month, while Time Warner Cable’s ARPU was around $148.70 a month, according to UBS. The video-only ARPU per month was roughly $78 a month. Both companies have a gross margin on the video business of roughly around 55 percent.

The two companies together would have about 33 million broadband connections that brought in about $18 billion in broadband revenue during 2013. It could go to about $23 billion by end of 2018.

Voice has very high gross margins – about 91 percent for Comcast and 82 percent for Time Warner Cable.

The NBC’s Olympic coverage could indicate the future of the combined companies. You can’t stream the games unless you are a cable subscriber – and basic cable does not count. Perhaps the next move for NBCUniversal/Comcast/TWC combo is to charge for air that was formerly “free” – in the WiFi band.

Comcast is enabling Wi-Fi via strand mounts and merchant access points. Tom Nagel, Comcast’s senior vice president of business development, would like to take over the “free” WiFi band, reports CED Magazine:

“I think we really want to get to 160 MHZ block channels. Today Wi-Fi is at 20 MHz channels. If I can do 160 MHZ, we can generate something close to a gigabit Wi-Fi and doing that not only makes the outdoor broadband better, but all of the in home connectivity better as well.”